Before they brought him on for the job, they asked, “How much would we need to pay you to do this for us?”

He answered, “However much you think I’m worth.”

That was the second worst answer he had given in his life.

In retrospect, the answer was fine. He was an honest guy. People knew he was an honest guy. In this world, that was the best kind of reputation anybody could have.

The problem was that he gave an honest answer to the wrong question.

They brought him on to do a particular thing for a more than acceptable price. But a complication here, a betrayal there, a dash of conspiracy for flavour and now he’s pulling a sabotage job on the people he’s been working for on and off for two or so years now.

He was still an honest guy, but some people deserve honesty more than others.

At least, that’s what he told himself as he punched the lights out of his superior officer and smashed his head against the bridge console. After that, he gently placed the officer in the fetal position and swiped his access keys.

“Hope this bug of yours works,” he said, two fingers to his helm.

“It’ll breach the topmost layers of the Nexus system,” said Flea, the team’s resident smart guy. “Might require some manual prompting here and there, but I’m sure you’ll be fine.”

Another voice came, gravely and low, and said, “Thanks again for helping us out, Knight.”

That was Bear, and no, that was not their actual names, nor their preferred code names.

Knight, as the team called him, was a solo operator. He was a guy who tried to keep his feet clean and his words honest, but sometimes you need the cash. Sometimes you had something to prove. Sometimes you take the job for the thrill. In Knight’s case, it was a shaken martini of all three, with a few personal reasons mixed in.

While the joint operation played out, his job was to sit in the bridge of the HDPS Oceanus II (the first one blew up due to mechanical failure, as far as Knight could remember) and hit the big red flashing button that said to the Nexus system, No, there definitely aren’t fifty people carrying out a sabotage operation right now. Don’t sweat it one bit, computer and crew.

He’d also like to say it was a nice day out and there was a beautiful view, but that nice day and beautiful view were fading from the screens. They were now flying into a place no nation wanted to claim, a place where accidentally looking outside would knock out somebody who wasn’t already used to searing their brains with blinding lights.

Decent change of scenery, though. The clouds were far below their feet and it was perfectly clear up here.

The HDPS Oceanus II was a battleship, amphibious assault, and aircraft carrier rolled into a single package, propelled by a house-sized gravitational engine. Just another cruiser-class, one of the standard vehicles for transporting prohibitively large amounts of firepower over great distances.

Even these ships didn’t stand a chance when they got close to the boundary between life and unreality.

That was the whole clincher here, you see. This way, there was no evidence.

Once they flew underneath that sky, there was no returning.

This whole operation was an elaborate smash and grab. But if you burned down the whole bank with everything in it, the authorities would have no idea what was really stolen and what was lost to the flames.

The joint task force, the whole crew of revolutionaries and faithful dissidents, they never told him any of this. They’d never tell the whole story to a washed-up Class 0 Relic Hunter who was barely considered alive.

Get in. Get out. Pilot the evidence into a black hole.

It was the perfect plan, as long as you had somebody take the fall.

That was Knight’s job. They didn’t tell him it was his job, but it was definitely his job.

He may have been a big guy, but he wasn’t a stupid guy. Far from it.

There were plenty of responses to have to a suicide mission and most of them, depending on a given person’s psyche and disposition, were reasonable in the context of being told to sod off and die.

Knight was in a good mood today, so his ultimate response was to put his feet up on the console, nudged the ship a little way to the right, and hit a certain big red button underneath the desk.

Alarms blared. People started yelling at him. The cameras flickered back on.

In his left ear, the joint task force screamed about the cover and the importance of the mission. In his right, the crew of the Oceanus were chiming into the Nexus system and asking if this wasn’t a drill.

To both, he answered, “You have twenty-five minutes before we reach the radix point. Best wrap up your business and get going.”

With that, he disconnected from all systems and relaxed into his seat on the command bridge.

Most of the staff didn’t need to be told twice. Those guys ran, ran as fast as their little human legs to take them. A bribe and early alarm took care of everybody in the command bridge.

It seems like the proud commander here wished to go down with the ship, but Knight wasn’t having any of that.

The Pale Dawn Theocracy was a strange bunch, usually too busy infighting over which obscure divinity was the true spirit of the Pale Dawn, but they made some fine cigarillos. Knight extracted a pack of four premium exports from the commander’s jacket, payment for an escort to the escape raft.

In his mind, this was the best option. This was going to happen either way, but with a single tap of the controls, he could make sure at least a few people got out unscathed and put a stop to the problem.

The people on both sides of this localized conflict fought for their ideals. There isn’t a single war in this world or the next where both sides didn’t think they were doing the right thing; deep down, everybody wants to be a hero.

Knight couldn’t regard that with anything more than passing apathy.

He was a man without expectations. Not for other people, nor for this world, and he certainly had no expectations for himself.

And so, he lit a smoke and watched the chaos, letting everything play out as it should. As it certainly would.

When twenty five minutes were up, Knight was the last living person on the Oceanus. The ship’s gravity reactor failed, and all that remained was a plummet towards the steel clouds below.

Back then, a man came home, covered in the blood of strangers. There was no one waiting for him in his box-sized apartment, so he opened another beer and lay on a dirty mattress until the neon stars washed him over.

In the middle of the night, he received a call. They talked business. He listened.

Some time later, he received another call from the people opposing the initial caller. They talked business. He listened.

Knight made it a personal policy to always work for the highest bidder. But for this special occasion, he let other people put a price tag on him.

In the end, the highest offer he received was nothing. Both sides didn’t think much of him and only gave him empty promises. You’d be insane to expect anything from a Class 0, really.

But none of this be helped, could it?

No matter what happens, nothing really changes.

Knight flicked away the burnt cigarillo tip and waited for the end with closed eyes.

He never felt the impact.